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World's First XP System Sold
A reader writes "New zealands largest OEM PC Manufacturer, The PC Company sold the worlds first Windows XP system. Details can be found at this article on NZoom" And so, it begins.
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TWW
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Congratulations, you have passed slashdot's "you are a dumb insular American test"! Just kidding :-)
While Americans ignore most of the worlds sport and simply invent their own to have American World Champions, many countries play the same sports! This reference to "All Black" refers to the New Zealand Rugby Union team who are historically one of the most respected and best forces in Rugby. They are called All Blacks as their strip is all black! The press are mentioning this as it was obviously a publicity stunt by The PC Company to ensure greter coverage in their native NZ (and in fact it is a good enough gimmic to probably get some attention outside NZ). A quick look at a google search and this page also suggests Mr. Howlett might have been chosen as "the fastest man in NZ rugby". I guess we won't really know unless someone can show us the material The PC Company are putting out.
Never underestimate the dark side of the Source
generally, in the past, oem's have received new MS OS's some time before you can buy a non-oem version.
XP, basically being a polished 2k, is nice and stable - 12 days playing games, installing crap, uninstalling crap, hibernating almost every night and generally Doing Stuff isn't bad.
:)
I finally rebooted it when it took a worryingly long time to hibernate (this, to the uninitiated, involves writing all memory out to disk, suspending drivers etc so the system can come back up in it's original state) - which I think's fair enough, seeing as it's quite a large task to ask any OS to do.
XP also happens to boot very fast.. in fact, it's faster than coming out of hibernation here, and certainly comparible to an equivilent Unix system.
Most of the new GUI stuff's a bit crap, but you can turn it all off with ease. The KLIK[tm] support for networking's quite nice, with bridging, NAT etc available with a few mouseclicks. It even sets up a firewall when you set up networking, and (*shock* *horror*), it's actually quite good.
It performs at least as well as 2k, with tweaks in most of the right places, hence making it Quite Good[tm]. And it runs vim, UT, Q3 and CS - what more could you ask for?
MS has been giving out free copies of XP final, full retail, pro edition to pretty much every salesperson in computer stores across north america (i.e. the warez versions are the iso's of these discs). They had a fairly hot chick do the demonstration too, hell, I admit I'm shallow.
...)
MS also gave a crapload of stuff about why you should sell XP to your customers, etc, etc.
And yeah, MS is at the very least bold in some of the things they do.
How about this - before you log in, XP tells you whether you have passport mail waiting.
Buy music = goto microsoft music, digital pictures -> MS.
Allow tech support (or others) remote control of your PC? You have to be using messenger (or at least, that is what is built in) This ought to be fun when an exploit is discovered. Full system takeover is possible.
Especially optimized for P4 (MS and intel, sitting in a tree, k.i.s.s.i.n.g
No fucking AOL (which, as a DSL tech support agent is music to my ears)
Built in firewall (shitty one though)
Built in ICS
Built in passport games...
No apparant way to remove messenger.
The happy registration (which has already been cracked quite completely)
Essentially what MS is doing is creating a computer software system (aka turnkey solution) in a box. Joe user won't have to buy anything else for his pc if he buys xp. I'm sure a lot of third party vendors are going to be pissed because they won't have a market for their products, but then again, geeks never bitched when MS included undelete w/MS Dos 5.
On the upside,
MS finally got rid of netbeui, so your network file transfers won't be slow as shit over the network.
MS made the gui skinnable (almost exactly like windows blinds)
hibernate ACTUALLY WORKS (third times a charm)
it seems to actually be running stable (uptime 1 month, with my parents on it, which means _alot_, i.e. the system has not gone down since I installed it on an overclocked celeron box),
added a change user function, which allows the system
added the ability to "telnet" in and logon using the remote machines cpu power, ala X-Windows. Essentially terminal services on every machine.
It looks fischer price, and I hate to say it, but MS might of have done what they promised to do when they release Windows 95. The price is insane though, $300US for full pro edition!!!!!
Oh. If you work in a computer store and want a free (legal) copy, florida (24,25,26), texas (24, colorado(15),az(24), still have seminars going. Check
http://www.microsoft.com/retail/live/
though its kinda late. Proof of employment can be a tshirt w/ a name badge. See the evil for yourself.
Well, gnight.
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Windows XP runs EVERYTHING at root, which means every program (and even the trojans hidden within that program) has full access to all Windows services
Pigs arse everything runs as root. When you create a new user, it asks you whether the user is a admin or regular user. Regular users are NOT root.
And for more control, you can fire up the Users and Groups MMC, and put users in appropriate groups, and set appropriate permissions.
Who the hell is this Cringely dolt?